December 2016

When I was a wee lad in Rochester, New York, I looked forward to each December when my parish released its Catholic calendar for the new year. My favorites were the ones that featured sacred artwork, but since I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I had to content myself with my share of landscapes and cuddly pictures. St. Gertrude’s calendar for 2017 is probably the best calendar I’ve ever seen, with details for each feast, catechetical information on noteworthy saints, a list of the Sunday readings, and plenty of gorgeous artwork. Someone obviously chose this calendar with care. (Saint Gertrude of Cincinnati’s Madeira neighborhood hosts the Dominican priory for the Province of St. Joseph.)

Back in the day, I used to do a news roundup of the Catholic Telegraph of Cincinnati when a new issue was posted online. It’s thankfully not as target-rich an environment these days, but every now and then the editors include something that cocks an eyebrow. A case in point is a recent article about a group Glenmary Home Missioners visiting the Saudi-financed mosque in northern Cincinnati. The paragraph excerpted below, in which the local imam not only can’t bring himself to condemn the Moslem who terrorized Ohio State University but insists that Moslems are the actual victims, is sadly par for the course in these sorts of stories. It’s a shame their contrived propaganda gets the imprimatur of the Archdiocese.

“Sometimes it does worry us when incidents such as that take place that some sort of reaction could come about on innocent individuals that happen to be from the Muslim faith,” Musa said. “There is somewhat of an obvious knee-jerk reaction that you may expect here and there, but I think people are much wiser than that in general. It is a terrible, terrible incident that took place (at Ohio State). Our prayers go out to the victims and the victims’ families and to all of us as we’re all victims of that kind of horrible and unacceptable behavior.”

And speaking of contrived propaganda, there’s this nauseating ultramontanist bit in the just-released print edition from the head of the Worship office for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, who traveled to Rome with another partisan archdiocesan organization, the Social Action Office, to meet Pope Francis for the closing of the off-calendar Year of Mercy:

“When you see pictures of Pope Francis, he has such a kind, humble face,” Kane added. “Every picture is filled that humility and love of Christ [sic]. And, yes, he is the same in person. He personifies Christ. I came to know that in a very real way when I met Pope Francis. It was very powerful.”

In much better news the conversion story of Father Tom Wray, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Director of Evangelization and Discipleship, was featured on EWTN’s The Journey Home, and Archbishop Schnurr approved the sisterly order Children of Mary, in residence at the Holy Spirit Center, as a “Public Association of the Faithful.” Kudos to him and congratulations to them.